Way to apply height data into Displace modifier (or equivalent transformation) on a plane
Use a RGB TIFF

Ok, it is a tricky solution, and I am not sure the behaviour of the "Fields" checkbox. But it seems to yield reasonable result with my testing toy data. The idea is using the commonly used displace modifier. But, as I could not come up with a friendly format, I use a regular RGB to work in Blender.

The workflow is the following:


Adapt the raw data into a 24 bit resolution (integer), and partition it in three bytes. The idea is that (0, 0, 0) is the lowest, (255, 255, 255) the highest, and the following trivial conditions are assured:


(0, 0, 255) &lt; (0, 1, 0)
(0, 255, 0) &lt; (1, 0, 0)

Save the previous 24 bit into a RGB channel TIFF. The data is a bit strange, but as a matter of fact, you have 24-bit of "information" per pixel.
Make the typical plane > displace > image > etc. in Blender, and activate the checkbox of "Fields".
If I'm not mistaken, you have now a height-mapped 24-bit resolution thanks to the RGB 8-bit per channel TIFF.




Edit: Now I'm trying this with real data, and it seems to fail (the height is veeery noisy, so it seems that I have misunderstood the "Use fields" option, which I cannot find in the documentation. For now, I will use 8 bits of data. Which I am not very happy with.